Nina Simon: Icon of Jazz and the story of her doomed struggle with herself and the world
At world festivals began to show the documentary "What Happened, Miss Simone?" Liz Garbus about the legendary Nina Simon. In the winter of this year, he opened the Sundance Film Festival, then he was presented at the Berlin Festival on the Panorama program, on June 26, he was promised to be posted on Netflix, and in Russia, we hope, the Beat Film Festival will show it. The film tells about the star of blues, soul and jazz since her first piano lessons in North Carolina, three years before she died in a dream in 2003. 40 albums in sixteen years, and then almost twenty years of oblivion, lost rights to own songs and a daughter, which Simon struck out of her will - 100 minutes of chronicles and rare interviews tell what actually happened around and inside this grandiose woman all her life.
“I’m so tired, but you don’t understand what I’m talking about,” a woman with bright eyes will say at a concert during the famous festival in Montreux. 1976, it is brought onto the scene under the arm, the hall applauds. She is wearing a black dress and a simple short hairstyle, her eyes are watering, her lips are trembling, and her eyes are confused - this is how crushed people look around when they are looking for what they should catch on. She seems to be waiting for the audience to tell her which note to take next. It seems another minute, her strength will run out - and she will simply collapse on the piano. Nina Simon begins to sing the song "Stars", stumbles, and then sees someone leaving and shouts into the microphone three times: "Sit!" - why in the hall there is a loud laugh of awkwardness, confusion and shame: either for the person who decided to get up and leave at the most inopportune moment, or for the superstar who yelled at the viewer, as they yell in a queue or at a train station.
Another concert is dated 1969 and begins with the song "Four Women" about four African Americans, their unenviable fate, fatigue and deeply hidden anger - the song could best be understood in this place and at that time: in Harlem a year after the murder of Martin Luther King . In half an hour, excited Nina Simon brandishes a piece of David Nelson's verse: "Are you ready to kill if necessary? Are you ready to destroy white things and burn buildings if necessary? Are you ready to build black things?" - the crowd happily agrees. A few years later, Nina Simon, who gave concerts almost every day, will not perform at all, and concerts in Harlem and Montreux will remain as unconditional evidences of extremes in which the legend of jazz and soul lived its life — aching despair and ecstatic aggression. And not a single concert, of which Nina Simon gave several thousand in her life, is not like the other, but each one had too much sadness and often rage.
"What happened, Miss Simon?" - no one dared to ask in public to the singer herself when she disappeared and suddenly appeared in public, lost her voice, money and rights to her own songs. In her autobiography, “I Damn You,” which came out in 1992, Nina Simon talks a lot about detailed love affairs, influential friends and spontaneous decisions, political activists of the 60s and the battle for freedom for all, in which she joined without fear and doubt. But about bipolar disorder - the diagnosis with which Simon lived most of her life, not knowing about him and not treating him for many years - was not known until 2004. Then the relatives and colleagues of the singer began to cautiously tell in an interview about what was hidden behind the glittering image on the stage, with tremendous talent, sonorous voice and the struggle for the weak. In the film Liz Garbus it becomes clear why her voice sounded "like gravel, then like coffee with cream". "She fought with demons around and inside herself" - so to speak of many talented people, but in the case of Simon, the demons around and inside are more than obvious and appear in all their ugliness.
Nina Simon's first demon is racism. Household and become part of American culture, which is not crushed only very persistent. The one with separate washstands for people with different skin color, with announcements “Black, Jews and Dogs are not admitted”, separate training and buses for whites, where the foot of an African American could not step under the threat of criminal liability. Native Eunice Waymon was the heart of a large family and a whole community when she began to play gospel music in church and accompany her mother during worship services. She recalls how the railways separated her quarter from the white world, where the young men were sent to learn to play the piano, and how the white hands of the teacher were so different from her own. How she felt like a stranger and unaccepted among white children who were engaged with her together. And as parents, Eunice was transplanted from the first spectator row back when a white couple drew in the aisle during the concert. Eunice rose from her seat and at the age of eleven said that she would not play the song until the end, until the parents were returned to the places they occupied - this particular episode Nina Simon will remember as the beginning of her personal struggle for civil rights.
In Simon’s autobiography, sad and angry comments about themselves are found: for too dark skin, full lips and a wide nose - which alternate with statements about the right to one’s own non-standard beauty. Stereotypes from a hostile environment aroused anger, but were rooted in self-esteem, and Nina Simon did not want and could not forget the rudeness that Eunice Waymon faced from the other, living in North Carolina and girls like her, failure to enter a prestigious college of music and the habit straighten your hair to look decent.
Dealing with racism Nina Simon found the strength in front of everyone - in 1964, she wrote "Mississippi Goddam" after the political assassination of activist Medgar Evers and an explosion in the Alabama church, which killed four African-American children. "The song for the show, which does not exist yet" was played in front of a successful public at Carnegie Hall, and then before a forty-thousand-day procession for equal rights in the city of Selma - Nina Simon had the courage to say what was written on posters or shouted on the streets mostly African American men: "Don't live next to me, just give me my equality!"
Nina Simon spends the 60s with the best minds of the African-American community: Malcolm X becomes the godfather of her daughter, and playwright Lorraine Hansberry and writer James Baldwin spend the evenings in the living room. Even with women, Nina Simon does not talk about nonsense: "We have never discussed men or clothes, only Marx, Lenin and the revolution is a real girlish conversation." In "Brown Baby" Nina Simon rethinks a lullaby: sleep, my joy, go to sleep, you will live in a better world, where there is no such pain and evil, and follow the path of freedom. And in "22nd Century" it makes promises sharper and more incredible than in "Imagine" - about free gender reassignment of men and women and the liberation of animals from the power of people.
The second demon for Nina Simon was her own husband: domestic violence does not spare not only the nameless housewives, but also the high priestess of the soul. The first marriage of Nina Simon - with a beatnik-hitchler on the street - ended swiftly, as it began - and was associated with the uncertain steps of the singer in a big city. Eunice Waymon just arrived in the suburbs of New York and got a job as a pianist at a nightclub, changing her name - literally, so that her mother would not recognize. Nina, the girl, was called by her then Latin American boyfriend, and the Frenchwoman, Simona Signoret, shone in the news with her husband Yves Montand. The ready nickname was formed in the first album “Little Sad Girl”: even then Nina Simon understood that the sad songs work out better than others. As you know, the blues is when a good person is bad. In Atlantic City, a girl who dreamed of becoming a classical pianist, suddenly found her own voice - so that people would come to the institution, it was necessary not only to play, but also to sing. At first, Eunice Waymon was incredibly afraid and re-singing other people's songs that remained with her forever - the first hit of "I Loves You, Porgy" or the very version of "I Put a Spell on You".
Even before the second marriage, Eunice Waymon became the favorite singer of the public Nina Simon in Greenwich Village, but it was her husband who was obliged to popular popularity, tight schedules and new incomes. Witty, loud and decisive Andrew Stroud before meeting with Nina Simon worked as a detective in Harlem, but after the affair with the singer, he left the police force, married her and became her manager. As it turned out quite recently, Nina Simon’s takeoff did not go without stimulants, which she accepted to keep fit and constantly give concerts, and without slaps from her husband, with which he “revived her” before a performance or stopped up during long quarrels. Nina Simon’s daughter remembers how her father could have her mother mummed in the middle of a conversation in order to insist on her - Nina Simon used the same technique ten years later when she began to educate her herself. What Liz’s daughter, speaking on Broadway under the pseudonym Simon, is now talking about on camera easily fits into the yellow press’s speculative headline: “drunk, depressed, frightening monster instead of mother” - but her confession is hard to doubt when she starts to fidget in a chair and swallow a lump in the throat in front of the operator.
Divorce for the singer was not only a personal collapse, but also a career one - by initiating the separation, she was not able to do business, constantly speaking and negotiating tours. On Andy Stroud, too many contacts were made, and Nina’s illness Simon did not give her a chance to take matters into her own hands. The diaries of the singer are cited in a documentary film and show how shame, the desire to justify the offender, the need for care and many years of neurosis are struggling in the victim of violence. "Break down and let it all out" for an expressive, complex and tortured artist was the only way out.
The hysterics were followed by alcohol dependence and flight from United Snakes of America (as the singer herself called her motherland) to African Liberia, European Switzerland and France. Andy Stroud did not answer for his actions either then or after many years - his appearance in "What Happened, Miss Simone?" avoids the uncomfortable question of violence and explains the difficult and hysterical nature of the singer. Can you record 40 albums in 16 years without stimulants, threats from the husband-manager and alcohol? Do you need these 40 albums at such a price - and the singer's friends, and she herself is lost in the diaries in the answers: "Yes ... Probably ... Maybe it was not possible otherwise ... Why am I doing this? ... I hate him ... I despise myself ... I myself can not live without violence ... "
Nina Simon’s constant illness, which she suffered from for about 25 years - her main demon - is an indirect cause of the incredible obsession with music and the direct source of many dramas in the singer’s life. Passive-aggressive behavior with loved ones, the desire to live on the edge, fight for justice through the extremes, “shake the audience so that it disintegrated into small pieces” are aspects of manic-depressive psychosis, which remains not fully understood and incurable even now, not to mention about medicine thirty years ago. To torture yourself and others, to search blindly and burn brighter - the only way out that remains sick when they do not receive outside help and rely only on themselves.
A close friend and constant guitarist of Nina Simon El Shekman finds her in Paris in a lowered state, playing the piano in a shabby bar to feed herself: no one knows who this tired woman is at the piano. She almost herself has forgotten who she is, and lives in debt like silk - the singer is sent for the first time in her life to compulsory treatment, which must be constantly maintained and renewed. The Montreux Festival, described above, is her struggle to stay on stage, which is almost impossible to win. Nina Simon once again disappears from the radar in the early 80s. She shoots in the leg of the neighbor guy, which prevents her from concentrating, - so "Sit!" from a concert in Montreux turns into "Stand! Hands up!". She walks naked with a knife around the hotel and unsuccessfully sets fire to the house, after that - an acquittal and new therapy sessions.
The next time Nina Simon arises from oblivion, when Ridley Scott will remove the Chanel ad number 5 c Carol Bouquet in a red suit on the track among the canyons. The old-fashioned and light "My Baby Just Cares for Me" will be chosen as a jingle, and Nina Simon will sell all the tickets to the Paris Concert Hall Olympia for a week in 1991, and this time all Parisians will know who is performing in front of them. But the treatment of the bipolar solution left a noticeable mark: during the therapy, Nina Simon played more slowly, sang harder, concentrated more and more difficult in public. By the early 1990s, breast cancer was added to bipolar disorder — Nina Simon dies in her sleep at the age of 70 in southern France, when chemotherapy is added to TIR therapy.
The autobiography “I curse you” is reissued, and her close ones begin to confide little by little about the illness of the singer and all the trials she went through. In the movie "What Happened, Miss Simone?" it is striking how difficult words are chosen and explanations of uncomfortable situations, vices and tragedies are found: cruelty, segregation, manic-depressive psychosis, panic attacks, alcoholism - all this is so difficult to pronounce out loud, without breaking personal promises, oaths and carefully kept secrets. Relatives thrive when they talk about music and talent, and get lost when they need to talk about something inherent, but sick, taboo, swallowed.
In 2008, Barack Obama will call Nina Simon's song "Sinnerman" one of ten of his favorite songs, and David Lynch will end the Inner Empire with it. Then Lil Wayne and Kanye West will, in freestyle form, refer to Nina Simon in their hits, Beyonce and Adele will mention her among the examples to follow, and Lana Del Rey will tattoo her name. The upcoming biopic about Nina Simon, which Zoya Saldana, who does not look like her, should play, will cause a scandal and a lawsuit against the director - and the voice of The New Yorker is best heard in this hundred votes. From her story about the life of the singer, it becomes clear why Nina Simon cannot play a slender, conventionally beautiful actress from a completely different universe.
It is clear that more viewers will come to Zoi Saldana than to Jennifer Hudson. It is clear that a smiling girl in a trapeze dress who sings "My darling thinks only of me" is easier and more pleasant to accept than a tear-stained wife crying in hysterics or a radical activist with a Black Panther hairstyle. But an honest conversation about Nina Simon is needed in order to follow the inspirational history of the star to see the tragedy, which often goes a step in a step with a gifted person invisibly to others. Every time when Nina Simon will hold her breath, pull the vowels and scream to the public, you remember that the nerve in this voice brought her possessor to death. And this death has witnesses, reasons, and a merciless chronicle of letters, albums, lyrics, and live recordings.
Photo: Getty Images / Fotobank (1), Sundance Institute
